As I sit in the last year of my 30s, ready to embrace a new decade and becoming 40, I pondered on my life? What I have achieved? Where I am heading? What things do I need to let go of? Question after question transpires as my analytical nature sets this milestone as an ending and a beginning.
Transformation of one decade to another…
The biggest thing that occurred to me is lots of transformation happened in my 30s. It felt like a period where shedding things which no longer served my life, my beliefs and my dreams took place. This was helping me find my authentic self. The real me, the true self, which had been underneath a pile of other people’s expectations, society’s bench marks and family patterning. Some done in the power of love and some born out of fear. Either way their creation in my life needed validation, where as in my 20s I would say I was way more accepting of things on face value. This life lens had zoomed in and took a close up of me. By doing this and really getting to know myself better, it helped this lens figure out a way of zooming out but this time create a more balanced lifestyle. The desire to climb the corporate ladder from my 20s and early 30s subsided due to a work-related stress illness which created mild stroke like symptoms in my body. I wouldn’t like to say I took my health for granted before my health declined. I actually believed I was healthy. I ate a healthy diet, I didn’t smoke, I exercised regularly and yet my body become so depleted by the workload of teaching, it literally started to stop working. What I didn’t take into consideration was the NEED and the POWER of REST. I wasn’t taught this and neither was it role modelled to me. The first time I learnt about the importance of self-care was when I needed to restore myself from burn out.
The Inner Critic…
When examining my physical health during my recovery of work-related stress came the acknowledgement of my emotional, mental and spiritual health. This is when I got curious about my thoughts and how I spoke to myself on a daily basis and its intrinsic relationship with my emotional and spiritual self. This inner triad of abundance which I had been ignoring, not out of being ignorant, but my consciousness had not made room for it before. This is when I realised I had spent years being an inner critic which did not act as my cheerleader. It was negative, unhelpful and quite toxic. The never ending cycle of ‘I am not good enough’ played on repeat – a continuous loop and this had a major impact on my emotions. The liberation came when I realised I had control and I needed to change a really bad habit of negative self-talk into one that supports, encourages and most importantly nurtures me. This I soon realised was challenging because I expected instant change, but as this habit had been with me for over 35 years, changing it over night was incredibly unrealistic. However like training the physical body, once you develop a skill over time, it becomes easier. I still haven’t mastered it and the journey of transforming and healing my inner world has brought up pain and even tears, but each time I shed that tear, feel that pain, is a step nearer to am I good enough. I am enough just as I am. Love, especially self-love doesn’t require a list of attributes, qualifications, exceptional experiences. It requires you believing in yourself, being kind to yourself and being yourself. As Eckhart Tolle says ‘Get the inside right. The outside will fall into place.’ So, as I close the chapter on my 30s, I feel invigorated and excited about the decade which I enter because this decade I get to take the teaching of cultivating a prosperous inner world with me. I have the knowledge which will be expanded upon and the message of I am good enough will radiant within me, instead of being a faint but growing presence like it has been in my 30s. I then plan to share this message of I am good enough across my teaching, so my students do not need to wait until their 30 to begin to experience the power of its presence. It will be like an echo, reaching all those that need it, near and far, so they can live in love and not bound by their fear.
About the author: Kelly Seaward is a teacher and completed her MSc Applied Positive Psychology course in 2018. She advocates the teachings within this field of psychology in her own teaching as a hypnotherapist, counsellor and psychotherapist. Kelly now specialises in mental health and well-being for teachers. Her mission is to helps teachers to reconnect to their passion for teaching, so their students can love learning positiveteachertherapy.weebly.com